ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at one, relatively limited, example of Margery Kempe’s reading and rewriting of another woman visionary’s text. It considers what a study of the material can contribute to the vexed question of how far the priest-scribe, as distinct from Kempe herself, is the “author” of The Book of Margery Kempe. Kempe’s scribe may have thought the reference to be self-evident, but in fact there is some doubt as to the exact identification of both the “tretys” and its author. Kempe, then, seems to have known the Revelations in the last decade of the fourteenth century or the first decade of the fifteenth, and it may have been she who drew the text to the attention of her future amanuensis. Kempe might well have felt that she had even more in common with the visionary Elizabeth than a certain style of spirituality.
